Four Dead Horses

by KT Sparks

  But for eighteen years your partner,

  wise and faithful, such a crony,

  Seems worth watching for, a spell,

  down where the ponies come to drink.

  The Cowboy Poet took the stage, his sorrel mustang, Hero, falling in at his side.

  Later, Martin would say that he should have known what was coming. Much later, he would believe that he had. But at first, on that night, he only wondered whether it was the fire code that kept the Cowboy Poet from riding Hero onto the stage, as Martin had assumed he would.

  The Cowboy Poet patted Hero’s dark nose, cleared his throat, and chanted:

  Sunny summer day it was when loping in to Laramie,

  I overtook the Walking Man, reined up and nodded “How!!”

  Of course. The riderless stallion made perfect sense. The Cowboy Poet was paying homage to the classic “The Walking Man,” Knibbs’s ballad of a wrangler’s ambulatory penance for the horse that saved his life. Perhaps this show would be a Henry Herbert Knibbs’s tribute. Wonderful, thought Martin. Wonderful and appropriate.

  “Pity the intern that has to clean that up.” Lattner elbowed Martin and nodded toward a pool of loose dung collecting in spurts behind Hero. Martin saw and sniffed at an odor akin to sewage. Something was wrong.

  The poet must have known it too. He froze one line into the third verse, his thumbs shoved in the waistband of his jeans, his shining belt buckle kicking the stage lights back in a spray of stars. A minute ticked by. Hero stretched his muscled neck and hung his great head low. Someone off stage squeaked out the missing stanza: “If good people go to heaven, do good horses go to hell?” Hero went down on his front knees.

  “Is he going to roll over?” Lattner sat up and placed his beer bottle on the ground.

  Martin leaned forward too but didn’t answer. Something was wrong. And he knew what it was. In fact, after cowboy poetry, what was wrong was something he knew more about than almost anything.

  “Is Hero falling?” A child’s voice floated from somewhere behind Martin.

  “No,” Martin whispered, to the child, to Lattner, to himself. “Hero is dying.”

  “No,” Martin whispered to himself. “Hero is dead.”

  He grasped the railing of the Theater-on-the-Lake mezzanine balcony and looked down past the multi-tiered glass chandelier into the lobby. The fire alarm continued to clang. He was alone on this level, having climbed the foyer staircase over the objections of the zit-splattered usher moving the crowd to the parking lot.

  “I’m with the show,” Martin had growled at the boy, who blinked back but did not insist.

  The theater had cleared quickly. The swath of earth on which Pierre sits is also the stomping ground of a particularly ferocious breed of tornado, and residents are hardwired from birth to move to the nearest ditch whenever an alarm sounds. Even Lattner bolted from his seat at the first flash of the red emergency lights, though Martin suspected that was the old newspaperman’s urge to get to the story rather than any instinct for self-preservation.

  “My phone’s in the car,” Lattner yelled over his shoulder as he headed for the side exit, straight-arming a retired elementary school teacher and leapfrogging a sobbing toddler in a straw bowler.

  Martin, gassy and faint with horror, leaned on the mezzanine railing. He belched, smelled stale sweat, probably his own, and stared at the terrible tableau below. In the center of the royal blue carpet, atop a ten-foot woven replica of the Pierre lighthouse, complete with swooping seagulls and tacking sailboats, lay Hero. From this angle Martin could see both that she was dead, and that she was a she. Had the shock of the horse’s demise not sucked the blood from his brain, this would have surprised him. The manly Hero a mare. But he was too caught up in the scene below to ruminate on the horse’s gender fluidity. She appeared as if she were in full flight. Her ink-dipped tail spread from her haunches, well away from her back legs kicked forward and her front legs kicked back. Her bleached blonde mane feathered rear from her sinewy chestnut neck, blown, it seemed, by the same stiff breeze keeping the shag-rendered seagulls aloft.

  The angular frame of the Cowboy Poet appeared from under the balcony. He brushed past Dr. Wiseman, the local vet, who stood several feet from Hero’s body, consulting with a middle-aged brunette in embroidery-splattered jeans and a red-checkered shirt. The poet went straight to Hero, dropped on one knee, and cupped the horse’s sooty muzzle in both hands. Martin couldn’t see beyond the brim of his black Stetson to make out whether the man was talking or crying or both. Martin sensed both.

  The clang of the alarm cut off with a click, and the buzzing silence that followed hurt Martin’s ears. Through it, he heard the woman’s raised voice and then the vet.

  “Dead,” he said. “Graveyard dead.”

  Martin was not sure if it were he or the woman who keened at the vet’s epitaph, but he suspected it was he. She and Dr. Wiseman turned to look up at Martin. The vet said something to the woman, and she continued to stare at Martin, working her jaw as if she were chewing gum in a flavor she hated. Then she nodded and pivoted back to the horse and grieving master. Dr. Wiseman locked eyes with Martin and, with one finger, beckoned him down to his destiny.

  The vet introduced the brunette to Martin as Lina Sharpe, the Cowboy Poet’s administrative assistant, then excused himself with a “more your department than mine, I’m afraid.” Martin and Lina clasped hands for too long. She said nothing, her eyes on the still kneeling Cowboy Poet. Martin heard himself blathering on about “nonhuman mortality solutions” and “organic tonnage hygienic disposal.” When the poet stood, Lina dropped Martin’s hand.

  “Vess,” she said, but he walked without a word toward the exit. She followed and after her, Martin, still jabbering about the tarps they had used to move Zach, “probably double the poundage in equine meat.”

  The Cowboy Poet stopped under a parking lot light and addressed Lina.

  “How can I?” he said.

  “I’m sure there’s something else,” she answered.

  He shook his head and turned toward the tour bus emblazoned with an eight-foot high rendition of Hero, alive and galloping across a starry sky.

  Martin continued to thrash in the throes of Tourette’s: “fluid to flesh ratio…local sanitation regulations…bloat and drainage options.” Lina edged back. He could feel this moment—his moment with the Cowboy Poet, the moment Martin returned to cowboy poetry, his moment to be of use to the art he still loved—on the verge of drowning in his infernal words, not poetry but a treatise on the practicalities of modern equine mortuary science.

  But then, like the cavalry over the butte, Lattner and his red sports car thundered into the parking lot. The roar of the Mustang’s engine stunned Martin into silence and halted the Cowboy Poet’s retreat. Lattner jumped out of the car, pink Canon Powershot around his neck, and reached for the hand Vess Guffry had extended—the now-smiling Vess Guffry had extended. Had extended right past Martin. As if Martin were a lamppost or a speed bump. A speed bump who could not stop talking about large animal corpse recycling.

  “’71, right?” The Cowboy Poet circled the back of car. “A coupe.”

  “That it is,” said Lattner.

  “I had one of these. New. Christ, what a great car. Are you with him?” The poet jerked his long chin at Martin but kept his eyes on the Mustang.

  “It’s his car,” Lattner said. Martin swung his head around but kept his mouth shut, unsure what gruesomeness might pop out if he tried to object.

  “Part of your business? Part of that pet cemetery stuff?” asked the Cowboy Poet, finally looking at Martin, and Martin nodded, lips pressed tight. Lattner, operating, he admitted later, on a selfless instinct that he had never experienced before and would never experience again, said, “Oh yes, this is the star of Final Paw’s memorialization motor fleet.”

  “Well, maybe we can work wit
h them,” the Cowboy Poet said to Lina. “You figure it out.”

  “Obviously NPR will do whatever Vess wants, but we’re not HBO, and canceling the rest of the tour is a financial nightmare. Maybe if Vess could do a couple of the shows, plus Elko. Really, he’s got to do Elko.”

  The man talking had been introduced to Martin as Mac something-or-other, an executive out of the NPR Chicago office. He looked to be in his late thirties and stood shining in a tailored dark gray suit, pinstriped shirt, and corn-yellow tie, pressing both hands so firmly into the laminated wood top of the conference table in the Final Paws’ Family and Friends Comfort Room that the tips of his fingers had turned white. He faced a framed poster of neon pink and orange cartoon dogs and cats tripping over a rainbow bridge toward a heaven of winged rawhide chewies and haloed squeaky toys. Martin should have told Annie to bring them into his private office, where the decor ran more to Remington prints and Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence posters.

  “I told you, he’ll do Elko,” said Lina. She wore the same rumpled checkered shirt tucked into the same stretched and creased jeans she had had on when they had been introduced twelve hours earlier, over Hero’s corpse. She stood at the window, staring out to the parking lot, her back to Mac but her profile in Martin’s view. She turned beclouded eyes to the thud of the door opening, the smell of Bunn-burned French Roast, and Annie, with the machine’s glass pot in one hand and a stack of Styrofoam cups in the other. “Hope no one wants cream. I don’t like storing, you know, live human stuff in the fridge over the weekend.”

  Lattner was on her heels, arms full of papers. “I brought some of the price lists and ceremony options. And this.” He tossed a newspaper clipping on the table. “From USA Today. From when Martin did the service for Zach.”

  Martin felt a bubble of pleasure gurgle in his gut. His old boss and friend had seen, cut out, saved, and chose to produce the article, a short account of the town’s over-the-top funeral for the beloved Zach. The piece included a rather striking photo of Martin at a lectern in the Bandstand-on-the-Lake and did not include a mention of his role in Zach’s last moments, so Martin considered it a public relations coup.

  Lattner spread the Final Paws brochures—titles like “Best Buddies and Bereavement” and “Dispatching Your Large Animal over the Rainbow Bridge”—in front of Mac and started fussing with the coffee cups, inserting himself into the business as he had been doing throughout the all-night process of moving Hero out of the lobby of the Theater-on-the-Lake and into the Final Paws Large Animal Funereal Facility. And now Lattner was prattling on about urns and faux marble memorial plaques to an increasingly grim Mac. Martin stayed silent. He was exhausted from navigating the crooked and continuing course of last night’s catastrophe: experiencing yet another live action horse death; hearing in person, seeing in person, meeting in person the Cowboy Poet; possessing a skill of use to the Cowboy Poet. And now, talk of a funeral for Hero in Elko, at the Thirty-Second Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence, broadcast live in lieu of the final Cowboy Poetry Hour, with Martin as the director of it all, the chief memorialist and mourner.

  Through the murk of his fatigue and sorrow, one lantern beam shone through, and he moved toward it steadily and gratefully: He would perform at Elko. Not as an outsider, not as a Midwestern pet funeral director with delusions of a Western alter-ego, but as one with a role, the most solemn role, the master of the dispatch of that most famous of horses of that most famous of cowboy poets. He was on the course he had sought forever but had glimpsed only on the far horizon and only a few times. He had glimpsed it but never before had he felt its hard grit under his boots, its gentle incline towards the high desert. He had glimpsed it, but never before last night had he stepped on the road to Elko.

  He had tried to call Julie several times over the last twelve hours, but she hadn’t picked up. At five a.m., he finally texted Going to Elko, for real. U still in? She replied in less than a beat: F-U.

  Lina crossed to the conference table and accepted a cup of coffee from Lattner. She passed her free hand over the spray of glossy paper on the table in front of Mac.

  “I like this, a memorial book,” Mac said, picking up one lemon-hued pamphlet from the pile. “We could take it to the shows, let people pay their last respects to Hero.”

  “Like Princess Di,” said Annie. “I heard they had a book for Princess Di. It went all over Michigan.”

  “Nice. Princess Di,” said Mac, buffing his tie with his fist and bobbing his head. “We could wheel the body out at the beginning, and Vess could, you know, say a few words and, like, for a ten dollar pledge, people could sign the book.”

  “Like Stalin,” encouraged Lattner.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Annie. “They did not bring Princess Di’s body over here. I think it was all burned up anyway. They just had a book, you know, of condolences and some pictures.”

  “There’s no sanitary way to keep a corpse of this tonnage on, as it were, ice for that period,” said Martin. “And under the stage lights, I am afraid that the situation with fluid dispersal—”

  Lina interrupted. “It doesn’t matter. There are no more shows. Mac, it’s settled. He’ll do Elko and the funeral, and then he’s done. He’s an old man, and he just lost his best friend and partner. The end.”

  Mac sucked his lips in, looked at the ceiling, and exhaled. “Shit.”

  “He’ll do the funeral,” said Lina and sat heavily on one of the conference table chairs, flicked at an information sheet on the Final Paws’ new high capacity crematorium. “He’s going back to the ranch until Elko, and he’ll meet up there with Hero—I mean, Hero’s remains, however it is they get there.”

  “I think Mr. Guffry has already seen and approved of the Final Paws’ hearse option,” said Lattner.

  “The ’71 Mustang?” said Lina. “Oh, Vess will love that.”

  “The stallion goes home on a stallion,” said Mac and fanned his hands as if seeing it in lights. “I like it.”

  “You do know Hero’s a mare, right? Was a mare,” said Martin.

  “Technically,” said Mac. “But for press purposes, she’s always been a stallion. And we’re going to have to do press on the funeral, text PETS and give ten dollars in memory of Hero or some other dead animal. Or a live one. We’ve got to recoup some of the loss. Part of the spring fundraisers maybe.”

  “I don’t care what you do,” said Lina. “Just leave Vess out of it.”

  “I’ll coordinate any media through you,” said Mac. “And”—he swiveled around to Martin—“your press folks?”

  “We don’t—” said Martin.

  “That’s me, Bob Lattner,” said Lattner, handing Lina and Mac a card. “That’s my direct line.”

  “You okay with social media?” said Mac, running a finger over the card’s edge, which curved as if hand cut.

  “Oh yeah, pretty much all I do these days,” said Lattner.

  “Settled then.” Lina stood up, drained the last of her coffee, and carried the cup to the trashcan by the door. Mac followed her.

  “Wait,” said Martin, bustling to the conference table and grabbing a fist of brochures. “We haven’t talked about funeral arrangements. There are a surprising number of choices.”

  “Yeah,” said Annie. “We had these one clients who had us bury the head and hooves of the horse and render the rest, because they said that’s how they do it in Kentucky.”

  “Well, don’t do that,” said Mac. “Whatever’s cheapest. Without being tacky. Or gross.”

  “Whatever gets you on the road to Elko the fastest,” said Lina, leaving the room. “Let’s get this over with.”

  The next morning, Martin paused in the doorway of the Final Paws’ crematorium and contemplated the suspended mustang corpse.

  “Wait,” he said.

  Mike Hueypipe, an auto mechanic, Annie’s ex-boyfriend, and the Final Paws IEB Series
100 Cremation System batch load operator, backed away from the button controlling the stainless steel leviathan’s electric-hydraulic loading door. Martin stepped forward. He placed his hand on Hero’s stiff snout. Cold. Also cold: the cement floor radiating up through Martin’s loafers, the mulch-laced May breeze blowing through the open sliding door of the tin building, the still air encasing the carcass dangling over the SmokeBuster burners.

  Martin thought he should say something, some last word before the IEB-100 went to work reducing Hero’s mortal remains to a trunk-worth of greasy sand and bone bits. Mike seemed to expect it, too, and stepped back from the machine’s control panel, bowed his head.

  Martin shut his eyes but nothing came. He couldn’t recall any cowboy poems that featured a mare, though he was sure they existed and that he had heard them. It disturbed him only a little that the Cowboy Poet had lied about Hero. After all, the stories the cowboy poets told were allegories, not census records, meant to shape lives, not count heads. Hero died, and because of that, Martin was going to Elko. Gender had nothing to do with it.

  Mike cleared his throat. Martin opened his eyes, removed his hand, and spun out the first Knibbs that came to mind, the ultimate verses of “Do You Remember.”

  Beyond each step there spread the deep Unknown;

  Below a hidden stream sang ceaselessly;

  We rode together—yet each rode alone,

  Do you remember, friend, who rode with me?

  As he intoned the last words, he opened his eyes, looked at the dead horse, and realized he was talking to Julie as much as Hero. She should be here. More than that, he needed her here. As excited as he was to ride the trail ahead, he wasn’t sure he was ready “to flirt with death” with only Lattner flanking him. Mike joined Martin in front of the open IEB-100 loading door.